One hundred years ago this week the great, the legendary, the enigmatic Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter was born. Richter lived with the paradox that all great performers must: that their recreative powers are seen and heard to transcend the music they are playing. That’s despite how forcefully he insisted on his absolute fidelity to the score, as if audiences should really hear only the unvarnished and immutable truths of the notes that Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Bach, or Prokofiev wrote rather than Richter’s own “interpretation”. But that can only ever be partly true, even if it’s a useful or even essential fiction that Richter needed to tell himself. (The pianist and writer Ken Hamilton certainly believes that was Richter’s strategy, as he told Andrew McGregor on last Saturday’s CD Review on Radio 3.) That’s because Richter’s approach resulted in some of the most distinctive and individual performances of the piano repertoire ever recorded. And it’s also because the truths that Richter was after were themselves historically mediated ideas: the supposedly timeless qualities of scores by Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert, say, that are anything but “timeless”, and are in fact enmeshed in historical contingencies, let alone the vagaries of published editions and performance practice conditions, and the fact that none of those composers would recognise the piano Richter was using, the way it was tuned (the equal temperament that all our pianos are forced into these days was not a popular choice among musicians until the late 19th century), or the conditions of his concert life.

All of which pseudo-philosophical dancing on the head of a pin is frankly brushed aside by the power of Richter’s playing, as you’ll hear in these 10 examples I’ve chosen from hundreds of possible performances to curate my own Richter-fest. It’s precisely Richter’s certainty, his integrity, the fact that music seems to speak with an Olympian objectivity at the same time as an impossible-sounding lyricism and sustained tone (listen to his extraordinarily slow yet convincing Schubert sonatas), without ever a shred of indulgence in virtuosity or sensuality for its own sake, that makes these performances definitively Richterian. That’s the point about his musicianship: its strength of conviction and imagination makes you believe when you’re listening to him that this really is the way the music has to go, that what you’re hearing truly is the fundamental core of these pieces.

A recording from 1960 (with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Erich Leinsdorf) that Richter was apparently unhappy with. It’s hard to hear why - this is a fearless, patina-stripping revelation of Brahms’s great concerto.

One of the classics of the post-war recorded legacy, but no less fascinating for its familiarity. The performance (made in 1959 with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra under Stanislaw Woslicki) proves the power of the Richterian ideals of his own kind of fidelity to the text, his refusal to accept conventions at face value, and his absolute insistence on technical and architectural clarity. It’s a multi-dimensional cocktail that turns this concerto into one of the most thrillingly emotional experiences of Richter’s entire discography.